Not unreasonably, I thought the tale of Aung San Suu Kyi's love for Dave Lee Travis could get no more sublime. Interviewed this week ahead of her Reith lectures, the Burmese democracy campaigner revealed the DJ's since axed World Service show had been a highlight of her years under house arrest. This, to make the obvious facetious joke, really brings the horror of the experience home.

I do hope you didn't miss the Hairy Cornflake being invited on to the Today programme to discuss the revelation, as DLT somehow managed to reduce the entire pro-democracy struggle to a mere plank of a far more important argument: namely, a decade-old BBC staffing decision with which he disagreed.

In doing so he crystallised perfectly the mindset of a particular type of cast-off BBC personality. It was just as possible to imagine the moan seeping from Noel Edmonds, or Simon Bates, or even Gentleman Jim Davidson – and of course from their fictional analogue, Alan Partridge. Theirs is the tragedy of misunderstood genius – indeed, one wishes the true poet of their number, Mike Read, could write one of his long-running musicals about such butterflies being broken on the wheel.

Meanwhile these blasts from the past remind one what a very blasted place that past was. I have no truck with the youth of today, who think the likes of former BBC 6Music DJ George Lamb are the worst thing ever. Certainly, Lamb is an irritant, albeit one now banished to the spittle-flecked Valhalla that is TalkSport – and in today's radio firmament he may appear to be an irritant of a rare order.

But these kids don't know they're born. They simply have no idea what it is like to turn on the radio and, with about three exceptions, actually want to do serious physical harm to whichever DJ is on air, as it was for years when I were a lad.

John Peel understood. It was Peel who, along with Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett, planned to ambush and attack Simon Bates in the BBC car park – a plan on which he sadly never delivered. Bates is still out there, apparently breakfasting on Smooth Radio, and doubtless furious at the coverage Suu Kyi's endorsement has lavished on his erstwhile rival. So please, don't retort that you think Jo Whiley's annoying and Chris Moyles an overrated boor. I will not for one second accept it is possible to feel the same levels of visceral hatred for either as you could for Bates, or DLT, or any of the other fallen masters of the Radio 1 universe.

Yet oddly, having said all this, here begins another love letter to the BBC. As mentioned, it seemed as if the tale couldn't get more sublime. But then it did, with news that the government had done a sudden U-turn on World Service funding, allocating an extra £2.2m to shore up the Arabic service that has played a significant information role in recent and ongoing uprisings.

That this should happen the very day after DLT's exhumation by the heroic Suu Kyi is curious timing. Can it really be that the Hairy Cornflake has in some small part – and obviously entirely by accident – contributed something of worth to human civilisation?

DLT will doubtless be peeved that official Foreign Office briefing fails to acknowledge his role in the Arab spring. More troubling, however, is the fate of the Foreign Office website worker who headlined the news "massive U-turn on BBC World Service Funding", before someone noticed and it was yanked. That the employee is now facing disciplinary procedures for stating the truth is a neat irony – and a reminder that the World Service's impartiality is better preserved by the BBC than the Foreign Office.

But quality relies on adequate funding – and the coalition's penny-pinching in this area is at best the most parochial failure of imagination, and at worst, an entirely political attempt to destroy the product.

On travels remote and otherwise over the years, I've lost count of the foreigners who have expressed admiration for the BBC, and I've always felt a mixture of totally unearned pride and amazement that something so many at home take for granted, or idiotically resent, has such an impact on the wider world. People are always banging on about how Britain doesn't make anything anymore, but the BBC is in many ways its greatest export – on a good day, it's even better than the arms we sell to Colonel Gaddafi – and certainly the country's last great institution, given the floundering NHS.

This is what makes successive governments' attempts to kneecap it so screamingly depressing, with the cost of not cutting the World Service absolute peanuts set in a context that would include the £260m we've spent on Libya thus far. There is only so much more chipping away they can do before it is effectively destroyed.

So next week, as the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt inevitably approves Rupert Murdoch's expansionist takeover of BSkyB, do just imagine a world in which people had to rely on big-hearted Rupe and the famously infallible market to provide a service a hundredth as good that offered by the World Service – even without the Hairy Cornflake enlivening its schedules.